It’s been hard to ignore the meteoric rise of the private messaging industry over the past two months.

First came Facebook's jaw-dropping $16 billion purchase of standalone messaging service WhatsApp in February. Chat app Viber was acquired by Rakuten for $900 million. Then messaging startup Tango raised $280 million in March, a funding round that valued the company at more than $1 billion, according to Forbes.

So it's no surprise that social media platforms, the ones that view messaging as a supplemental feature, have been busy keeping up.

On Thursday, Vine released Vine Messages, the app's first foray into private messaging. It's a competitive move to keep up with Facebook (whose Messenger and Instagram apps both offer private messaging) and Snapchat.

So how can you tell these services apart, and what are their pros and cons? Here's our quick primer.

Overview: Vine is the latest social platform to unveil private messaging, and its unrivaled video capabilities (stop motion, grid lines) should make it popular for video messages. But users can’t send videos from their camera roll, and the absence of group messages puts Vine messaging at a disadvantage.

Vine unveiled private messaging Thursday, but only time will tell how the new service fits in with other messaging competitors.

Overview: Instagram unveiled its messaging feature to lots of fanfare in December, but little has been said about it since. (There was some news yesterday, but it wasn’t positive; actor James Franco used Instagram Direct to connect to a 17-year-old fan.)

The feature certainly doesn’t detract from Instagram; it just doesn’t add enough to make it a major player.

Overview: This is the most robust app in the bunch. Messenger was poised for a big year in 2014; Facebook redesigned the app and made it faster (more like texting) in October, and Mark Zuckerberg mentioned Messenger multiple times during the company’s Q1 earnings call.

Then Facebook bought standalone messaging app WhatsApp for $16 billion, begging the question: where does Messenger fit in? Messenger supports free phone calls over Wi-Fi, making it another facet of Zuckerberg's attempt to connect the world online.

Overview: Twitter DMs have been part of the service from the start. It’s surprising, then, that the feature has not evolved more over the past eight years. You can send picture messages, as of December, but you can’t send videos, you can’t create group messages, and each individual message is limited to 140 characters. It’s a rather simple offering.

The rules about who you can message are helpful — you won’t get spammed by people you don’t follow — but they are also limiting. There seems to be lots of room for growth here, and we expect Twitter to do just that down the road.

Overview: There isn’t much pressure with Snapchat, which is a good thing. You aren’t going to use the service for serious back-and-forth messaging, and group messaging doesn’t exist. You can send stuff that’s fun, goofy, or inappropriate, and know that it will exist for just a short time on the receiving end.

The danger, of course, is that recipients can screen grab your photos if you want. So go crazy, but not too crazy — or get some more trustworthy friends.

Snapchat is great for sending goofy pictures or videos, but lacks a lot of features common in more expansive messaging services like text-only messages and group messages.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.